Site Mobile Navigation

Creating a New Reality, and a String of Hit Songs

The crowd at Irving Plaza quieted to a hush on Monday night as Chris Daughtry spoke between songs, asking his fans to sing along on his next number. “I assume you guys have the record,” he said, and a collective, largely female shriek answered in the affirmative.

With music sales chronically sluggish these days, not every artist can make such an assumption. But Mr. Daughtry, the brawny “American Idol” rocker with the cleanshaven scalp who was voted off last year in one of the series’s biggest upsets, has good reason to be confident.

Though on “Idol” he reached only as high as No. 4, Mr. Daughtry now has one of the biggest hits of the season. His debut album, “Daughtry” (RCA), opened at No. 2 on the Billboard chart when released in November, and it has remained in the upper ranks of the Top 10 almost every week since, reaching the top spot twice.

Dismal statistics have become regular news for the music industry; in the last eight months new lows have been reached three times for weekly sales of a No. 1 album. But with broad support from radio, “Daughtry” has been holding strong. Through Sunday it had sold just under two million copies in the United States, according to Nielsen SoundScan, far outpacing new releases by major stars like Jay-Z and Gwen Stefani. So far in 2007 only Norah Jones has sold more records.

Despite his participation in an aggressive promotional campaign, Mr. Daughtry, a 27-year-old from Greensboro, N.C., who nurtured the rock ’n’ roll dream in local bands for years before his “Idol” trial, speaks with a folksy modesty about his success.

“We’re just giving people a good show,” he said on Tuesday afternoon at a makeshift television studio in Chelsea, where he and his band, still a little groggy from the previous night’s show, taped a few acoustic songs for VH1, gave a string of interviews and would later head uptown for “Late Night With Conan O’Brien.” “We just want people to think, ‘Wow, that was worth every penny, worth waiting in line for all that time.’ ”

But radio programmers and music executives say that Mr. Daughtry has a couple of enviable assets: hit songs and the ability to write them as well as he can sing them. He was the writer or a co-writer of all but two of the tracks on his debut, and his first single, “It’s Not Over,” a midtempo torch song with a soaring chorus and serrated guitars reminiscent of post-grunge stars like Nickelback and Hinder, is a blockbuster on both pop and rock stations.

“It’s a great pop-radio smash,” said Sharon Dastur, program director at Z100 (WHTZ-FM), the New York Top 40 station. “The vocals are raw and passionate, but the lyrics are sensitive, honest. It draws a lot of people in.”

Like Jennifer Hudson, who lost on “Idol” three years ago but won an Academy Award for “Dreamgirls,” Mr. Daughtry is a victim of the show’s evaluation process, which brings forth major talents but does not always reward them with the top prize. In part this is because singers are tested on a variety of material that may not be their specialty, said Clive Davis, who has signed all the “Idol” winners and runners-up — as well as Mr. Daughtry — to Sony BMG Music Entertainment.

“I don’t care if you’re Dylan, Springsteen, Streisand, Aretha,” Mr. Davis said. “If your assignment is to perform material that is ill-suited to what you do, it is possible for major talent to lose.”

For Mr. Daughtry, who on the show sang songs from Bon Jovi’s “Wanted Dead or Alive” to “What a Wonderful World,” the competition did not give him a chance to show off all of his skills.

Photo

Im just out there every night having a good time and feeding off the audience, said Chris Daughtry, a rock musician with an American Idol past.Credit
Robert Caplin for The New York Times

“People get the impression that when you go on the show, you can sing, and that’s about it,” Mr. Daughtry said. “You’re not really allowed to show whether or not you can play or whether or not you can write. You’re just up there showing if you can sing that song good.”

Few “American Idol” stars have distinguished themselves as songwriters, though several have been co-writers on a few of their album tracks. Kelly Clarkson has co-writer status on a little less than half of her material.

For the career Mr. Daughtry wanted, songwriting ability was essential. After losing on “Idol” he was summoned to Mr. Davis’s office, where he performed “Home,” a ballad he had written on his couch in North Carolina before leaving for “Idol.” The performance won him a record contract as well as Mr. Davis’s respect.

“In the rock world to make it you have to write your own material,” Mr. Davis said. “And he was the first one that came off credibly in that area.”

Mr. Daughtry had one demand for Mr. Davis: He did not want to be made into a solo pop star.

“I told him I wanted to make sure that I was known as a band,” Mr. Daughtry said. “I didn’t want to be a solo artist. That’s never been what I was about. It was never an option.”

To prepare an album for fall release he had to work fast. He wrote songs while on the summer tour for “American Idol” finalists, recording demos with a laptop and some portable studio gear supplied by his new management and working with other songwriters on his days off. The album was recorded with studio musicians by the end of the summer, and by September he began putting together a band for eventual touring and — first things first — a lot of promotional activity.

Radio stations around the country were itching for new Daughtry material. Some had been playing his version of “Wanted Dead or Alive” from an “Idol” compilation, and in the weeks before his album’s release Mr. Daughtry played sessions for stations and for the music divisions of Internet giants like AOL and Yahoo!, where he was embraced as an underdog.

In its first week out the album sold 304,000 copies, but many rock stations were still holding off.

“We were worried that we would get a little flack because he did come off ‘American Idol,’ ” said Dave Hill, program director at WIYY-FM in Baltimore, which has since become one of Mr. Daughtry’s biggest supporters. “But there was a huge response. It came back from research at No. 1 in the first week.”

By January “It’s Not Over” was in heavy rotation on Top 40, rock and Hot AC (rock-oriented adult contemporary) stations, just as the band began a tour through midsize clubs — another strategy to build Mr. Daughtry’s reputation as a hard-working, legitimate rocker — and “American Idol” began its sixth season. This year the show has been using “Home” as a send-off for departing contestants each night; not coincidentally “Home” will be the next single from “Daughtry.”

For Mr. Daughtry establishing himself as a songwriter could be a way to cut through the “American Idol” clutter. More than 20 albums have been released by former contestants, and some, like those by Ms. Clarkson and Carrie Underwood, have been enormously successful. But as the “Idol” imprimatur has been extended to more and more singers, sales have not always remained stellar. Albums by the two most recent finalists, Taylor Hicks and his runner-up, Katharine McPhee, have lagged far behind Mr. Daughtry’s.

Radio programmers are eagerly awaiting more hits from him, but in the meantime Mr. Daughtry said he is relishing the crowds. His tour continues through April, with more promotional radio concerts booked for May. Tomorrow his concert outdoors in downtown Greensboro will be filmed for the “Home” video.